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September 18, 2004

Live Bookmarks

Some people have said that Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature is "weak" - that they lack the capabilities of a true RSS reader. Hopefully this blog will clarify a few things...

Live Bookmarks (which I refer to affectionately as "our dinky little RSS impl" - I'm sure Vlad loves me) were never intended to be an answer to the power RSS readers or a comprehensive solution to hardcore RSS/news junkies. There are plenty of software packages out there (including Thunderbird) that do a better job. Firefox's RSS capabilities are designed to expose as much of RSS to regular people as makes sense for light news reading/dynamic content. The intent is to allow the user to have a Live Bookmark on her toolbar and be fed the newest headlines daily, the latest bargains, the latest posts on some topic, etc. Our goals do not stretch much farther beyond this.

Some things we definitely do want:

Better auto-discovery of feeds, especially where a <link> tag is not used (although we hope more sites will start using the <link> tag - sites that do, please give your feeds meaningful title attributes! I hate seeing "Subscribe to 'RSS'" in the popup menu!
Highlighting of read vs. non-read items

Hyatt noted our lack of sophisticated aggregation support. Guilty - but is it such a crime? I find Feedster to be a dandy aggregation engine - and their search results pages are syndicated via RSS. So as I said in a column last week, go to Feedster (we could help here by adding a search plugin or a keyword), run a search on a topic you're interested in and subscribe to the results, adding the Live Bookmark to your toolbar. Easy aggregation - doesn't get much simpler than that. Now I'm sure there is lots of scope for new and innovative apps using Feedster and our RSS engine as a search and subscription tool, I can even think of a few myself - but until they're prototyped and we're testing them (as extensions), we won't know if they're real benefits or just geek toys. So, to the keyboards!

Posted by ben at September 18, 2004 4:25 AM

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